C-Series: McTaggart and the Nature of Timeless Reality

Sammanfattning

McTaggart is chiefly remembered for denying the existence of time. This thesis instead tries to reconstruct the positive doctrine that is meant to replace time in his mature metaphysics: the C-series, a non-temporal ordering that underwrites the appearance of temporal structure. Against influential reconstructions that treat the C-series as merely a formal ordering (e.g., the integers) appended to the A- vs B-series dispute, I argue thatMcTaggart’s C-series is inseparable from his substance-theoretic account of perception, mereological analysis, and determining-correspondence system. As I hope to make clear from the following sections, McTaggart’s philosophy of time is just a small part of a bigger metametaphysical project. This project has unfairly been neglected, and many expositions of McTaggart’s philosophical system have characterized it as eccentric. However, because of advances in the formulation of a Quantum Gravity theory, where time (and with it, spacetime) might not exist, contemporary philosophers have been forced to rediscover many of the pressures that made McTaggart’s positive theory urgent in the first place. And in this, McTaggart’s proposal of timeless reality becomes surprisingly classical.